[Ppnews] Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

[Political Prisoner News]

July 1, 2008

"You're Nothing But a Pack of Cards!"


Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07012008.html

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Some of us have known for years that the US 
administration’s basis for holding prisoners 
without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” 
has more to do with a fantasy world in which 
nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, 
and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles 
evidence that would stand up in a court of law.

At the heart of this fantasy world are the 
Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). 
Introduced in summer 2004, in a deliberate snub 
to the Supreme Court, which had just ruled that, 
contrary to the administration’s assertions, 
Guantánamo was run by the US and not by Cuba, and 
that the prisoners had the right to know why they 
were being held (under the “Great Writ” of habeas 
corpus, inherited from the British, and designed 
to prevent executive tyranny), the CSRTs were 
pale mockeries of the Geneva Conventions’ Article 
5 battlefield tribunals, which were intended to 
separate soldiers from civilians swept up by accident in the heat of battle.

The battlefield tribunals, which the United 
States promoted and used in wars from Vietnam 
onwards, took place close to the time and place 
of capture, so that witnesses could reasonably be 
called, and enabled the US military, during the 
first Gulf War, to send home nearly a thousand 
men who would otherwise have been wrongly held as Prisoners of War.

Post-9/11, with the Geneva Conventions shredded 
by the administration, the prisoners at 
Guantánamo -- “detainees” held as “enemy 
combatants” without rights -- had to wait two and 
a half years until, in response to the Supreme 
Court’s ruling, the administration introduced the 
CSRTs, which were ostensibly empowered to call 
witnesses, but in reality did no such thing.

Far from the time and place of capture, the 
prisoners’ requests for outside witnesses were 
all refused (on the basis that the most powerful 
government in the world was unable to track them 
down, even if they were serving in the US-backed 
Afghan government). In addition, the prisoners 
were refused the right to legal representation, 
and were prey to secret evidence, which was not 
disclosed to them, and which was frequently 
nothing more than hearsay, spurious allegations 
furnished by bounty hunters selling innocent men 
or foot soldiers to the US military as 
“terrorists,” or blatantly false confessions 
obtained from other prisoners through the use of torture, coercion or bribery.

The disgraceful failings of the CSRTs have been 
analyzed in depth, in particular in a February 
2006 report by the Seton Hall Law School (based 
on a series of “Unclassified Summaries of 
Evidence” released by the Pentagon in 2005), in 
my book 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (based on a 
detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents 
released by the Pentagon in 2006), and in a 
statement made last June by Lt. Col. Stephen 
Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked 
on the CSRTs, and who concluded that the 
gathering of materials for use in the tribunals 
was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence 
“of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often 
‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the 
individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the 
circumstances related to those individuals’ 
status,” that “what purported to be specific 
statements of fact lacked even the most 
fundamental earmarks of objectively credible 
evidence,” and that the whole system was geared 
towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Until now, however, the tribunals’ failings had 
never been deconstructed by a US court, and 
certainly not with the acute savagery reserved 
for last week’s ruling in the case of Parhat v. 
Gates. As one of dozens of cases that had been 
stuck in a legal roadblock after the executive 
persuaded Congress to change the law to remove 
the prisoners’ habeas rights (a decision which 
was only finally reversed three weeks ago, when 
the Supreme Court granted the prisoners 
constitutional habeas corpus rights), the bare 
bones of the Parhat verdict, reported last week, 
were explosive enough. In a one-page ruling, the 
judges in the District Court in Washington -- 
noticeably, two Republicans and a Democrat -- 
“held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status 
Review Tribunal” that Hufaiza Parhat -- one of 18 
Uighurs (Muslims from an oppressed outpost of 
China), who are not even alleged to have raised 
arms against the US -- was an enemy combatant,” 
and “directed the government to release or 
transfer” him (or to hold a new tribunal 
“consistent with the Court’s opinion”).

Now that the full opinion has been released, 
however, the damage to the administration’s 
credibility is even more pronounced. Tearing into 
the so-called evidence, the court reserved 
particular venom for the government's claim that 
Parhat was an “enemy combatant” because he was 
“affiliated with forces associated with al-Qaeda 
and the Taliban.” The government’s verdict hinged 
on a claim that the camp in which the Uighurs had 
been living in Afghanistan (before it was bombed 
by US forces, forcing them to flee to Pakistan, 
where they were sold to the US military) was run 
by a man who ran a Uighur independence movement 
(the East Turkistan Independence Movement), which 
was allegedly “associated” with al-Qaeda and the 
Taliban, even though, as the judges noted, “no 
source document evidence was introduced to 
indicate 
 that the Detainee had actually joined ETIM.”

Furthermore, the judges scolded the government 
for its shoddy attempts to link ETIM to the 
Taliban and al-Qaeda, noting that, as the Afghan 
government, the Taliban had provided “housing” to 
a variety of groups, “which no doubt ranged from 
orphanages to terrorist organizations like 
al-Qaeda,” but that these groups were not all 
“’associated’ with the Taliban in a sense that 
would make them enemy combatants,” and singled 
out for particular criticism a piece of 
exculpatory evidence -- a claim by another Uighur 
that the camp actually predated the Taliban 
regime -- which was excluded from Parhat’s CSRT.

They also took exception to the government’s 
claim that its “evidence” was reliable because it 
was repeated in a number of different classified 
documents, noting that the sources for this 
supposed “evidence” were both vague and 
impenetrable. They explained that descriptions of 
ETIM’s activities, and its purported relationship 
to al-Qaeda, were repeatedly described “as having 
‘reportedly’ occurred, as being ‘said to’ or 
‘reported to’ have happened, and as things that 
‘may’ be true or are ‘suspected’ of having taken 
place. But in virtually every instance, the 
documents do not say who ‘reported’ or ‘said’ or 
‘suspected’ those things 
 Because of those 
omissions, the Tribunal could not and this court 
cannot assess the reliability of the assertions 
in the documents. And because of this deficiency, 
those bare assertions cannot sustain the 
determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”

The judges also attacked an additional claim that 
the information would not have been included if 
it wasn't reliable. “This comes perilously close 
to suggesting that whatever the government says 
must be treated as true,” the judges stated, 
“thus rendering superfluous both the role of the 
tribunal and the role that Congress assigned to 
this court,” when, having stripped the prisoners 
of their habeas rights, the Detainee Treatment 
Act of 2005 allowed them the limited review that 
led, eventually, to the momentous decision in Parhat.

The judges also visited territory covered by Lt. 
Col. Abraham, demolishing “the government's 
contention that it can prevail by submitting 
documents that read as if they were indictments 
or civil complaints” and that it can “simply 
assert as facts the elements required to prove 
that a detainee falls within the definition of 
enemy combatant,” noting that following this line 
of argument “would require the courts to 
rubber-stamp the government's charges, in 
contravention of our understanding that Congress 
intended the court to engage in meaningful review of the record.”

In another line of attack, the judges noted that 
Parhat's lawyers had argued that the Chinese 
government -- the Uighurs’ only enemy, according 
to their many accounts at Guantánamo -- was the 
source of some of the classified information used 
against him during his tribunal, which prompted 
Judge Merrick B. Garland to conclude, “Parhat has 
made a credible argument that -- at least for 
some of the assertions -- the common source is 
the Chinese government, which may be less than 
objective with respect to the Uighurs.”

In the most stunning passage, however -- and the 
one that brings Lewis Carroll and the fantasies 
of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking 
Glass into sharp focus -- Judge Garland quoted 
from Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark as 
another method of discrediting the government's 
argument that its evidence was reliable because 
it was mentioned in three different classified 
documents. In one sentence, which, either by 
happy coincidence or deliberate design, shines an 
unwavering light on the post-9/11 fantasy world 
in which evidence can be conjured up out of 
nowhere, Judge Garland, who was joined in the 
unanimous opinion by Chief Judge David B. 
Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, wrote, 
“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the 
government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.”

Do you remember the trial at the end of Alice in Wonderland?

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King 
said, for about the twentieth time that day.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The 
idea of having the sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won't!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice 
 “You're nothing but a pack of cards!”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published 
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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